Stripe has acquired the usage-based billing startup Metronome for an undisclosed fee after seeing a record $40bn (€34.4bn) from 578m payments transactions between Black Friday and Cyber Monday
The move comes as Stripe recorded its biggest-ever four-day transaction period, with over €34bn in payments processed between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The amount paid by Stripe for Metronome has not been disclosed. However, the San Francisco based startup’s co-founder and CEO, Scott Woody, disclosed that it was Stripe that initiated the takeover bid.
Usage-based billing has become more popular in the AI era and is a more flexible way of offering services than traditional subscription tiers, which typically rely on two or three set prices with large usage capacity gaps between pricing tiers.
“Metered pricing is the native business model for the AI era,” said Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, commenting on the acquisition.
”As far as we can tell, the associated shift in how businesses generate revenue will be as big as the advent of SaaS. It may even turn out to be considerably bigger. We’re looking forward to integrating Metronome’s industry-leading capabilities with the rest of the Stripe Billing platform.”
Also commenting on the acquisition, Metronome CEO Scott Woody said that the deal would mean “faster progress on capabilities like seat-based credits, real-time spend alerts, and hierarchical accounts”.
He said that Metronome would become a core part of Stripe’s product suite.
“I have learned that starting a company is mostly an exercise in madness,” Woody wrote in a blog post about the deal.
“Occasionally, the madness is catching. In this case, I feel incredibly fortunate that our madness found good company at one of the most successful technology businesses ever built. After spending time with Stripe’s senior leadership, I am convinced we see the same future for monetisation. We share the belief that billing can evolve from a cursed backwater system into a true revenue operating platform for every software company. Faster product launches, real-time telemetry, and automated finance workflows are not nice-to-have. They are levers for growth.”
Today’s News in 90 – Wednesday, December 3
The acquisition comes as Stripe disclosed its biggest-ever four-day transactions period, spanning Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The company said that businesses using Stripe processed more than 578m transactions with a total payment volume of more than $40bn (€34.4bn) over the four days. It also said that cross-border transaction volume over the four-day sales period grew 37pc year over year, up from $3.2bn (€2.8bn) to more than $4.4bn (€3.8bn). The company also claimed that more than 24.6m attempted fraudulent transactions were prevented by its anti-fraud system, Stripe Radar.